Tips about Station Trading

This story begins with a piece of hardware I initially bought, to write a blog on. No, not this one.* The piece of hardware I’m talking about was the Lenovo G580.

My trustfully little notebook. Isn’t it cute?

With it’s integrated graphics card, the 4GB RAM and the amazingly powerful Intel i3 processor, running EVE was as smooth as a spoon of finest olive oil running down your throat – as long I had settings set for maximum performance, no other applications running in the back and finally, did not undock from station.

So the only way to play EVE without taking my beloved ships at risk (even) against HighSec rats was to stay docked and play station games.

I left potato mode on, because for spreadsheets in space stations, you don’t need nice shaders and fancy lights. I had made a decision and began station trading in Jita 4-4. “Buy low & Sell high” was all I knew at first. I watched some videos about it and soon felt comfortable enough to invest some millions into buy orders for items I thought would work.

Quickly the point was reached where I clearly saw the use of spreadsheets. Some use MS Excel, some Google Docs. I used a free open source program called LibreOffice. Armed with that I began monitoring where my ISK where – still at an amateur level.

Compared to any big fish I was barely existent. I participated at 0.1-ISKing in Jitas glorious market PvP. At peaks I had invested about 150 million ISK. Which actually was about 75% of the fluid ISK I had at the time. Kind of a personal big thing, if I would have messed it up.

I did this for like a month before I really had enough of it. Today I have much better Hardware available and can enjoy New Eden in all it’s beauty. But back to topic.

My Spreadsheet

Here is what my spreadsheet looked like. Much wow. Such gray. Ugh… I’m not claiming I was very good what I did there, but for me it worked. Somehow. Well, tips following down below this awful mess of a table.

Some Tips

Here they are. The tiny little things I have learned that made it easier and a little bit of understanding of EVEs economy.

You can increase/decrease the price in the buy/sell-dialog by 0.1 ISK using the arrow keys of your keyboard or the mouse-wheel.

You can have your own orders have highlighted by ticking a checkbox in the market options.
(there is a little gearwheel in the upper right of the market-window to geht there)

You can now safe tax by setting up your orders in a citadel. But you need to adjust the range of your orders – it might require some logistics when you sell the stuff later.

You can see the fluctuation and prices of an item. In an extra tab. It’s right beside the one which contains the orders.

Be aware, that you only see the regional market in the game. To see the whole picture you want to use websites like eve-marketdata.com

Items of daily need, that are consumed and then gone forever are good ones to start. (e.g. Ammunition or Drones; Skillbooks are good as imports into market hubs)

You can safe items by dragging their icons the tab called “Quickbar” and order them by creating folders. Also you can add text by right clicking on the saved item.

Oh, and keep in mind that you need to know all your factors of cost, to calculate accurate profits. This are the ones I (as an amateur) put into my calculations:

Brokerfee (for buying)

Brokerfee (for selling)

Sales Tax (iirc: depends on corp)

SSC Tax

And of course the difference between buying and selling…

I recommend you order this with a dummy-item to help you setup your calculations, before you use it on actual items.

How much did I make during that month of playing market-PvP?
I can’t really tell. What this old spreadsheet says is that I was able to make a bit more than 100 million ISK in about three days. How many hours did I spent per day? Probably quite a few.
Of course it’s possible to update your orders only once per day in 10 minutes and log out. You might make not that much, but eventually you will sell too.
If you want to dig deeper, check out @eveprosper.

Happy trading!

P.S.: Now that I wrote all that I wonder how other people do this. Or what do you do different? Did I make a grave mistake? Please let me know in the comments!

*I wrote a travel blog – in German – about my road trip through most of Australia. If you want to read it or look at some pretty pictures I made, it’s still up here: downupper.wordpress.com

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Published by greybill

Greybill is a part-time space captain who lives a mostly nomadic life in New Eden. He always tries to get deeper into PvP but is actually much better at avoiding it by flying cloaky stuff. You can get in touch and follow him on Twitter: @thegreybill
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